In
Minima Ethnographica, the poet and heterodox anthropologist Michael Jackson (what can you do) records what a Kuranko friend in Guinea kept under his bed as
kanda li fannu, “protective/enclosing things.” There was a
gbogure, a padlock enwrapped in Qur’anic verses and thread, used to silence an adversary in legal disputes. Also a
yuluba, a knotted cord ending in a noose and smeared with butter, another tool for silencing others. A
fele, a twist of black and white thread, which, when laid on one’s threshold, prevents enemies from coming in. Also
nisi, a protective unguent for the body made from the ash of Qur’anic suras. I’m quoting this almost verbatim.
Jackson defines these and similar objects as “an attempt to come to terms with inner frustrations by objectifying them in a form that is responsive to one’s will, tractable, and manageable,” enabling one to “regain... control over a situation in which one’s mastery was undermined or lost.” Ultimately, Jackson writes, the sole meaning of a piece of one of the
kanda li fannu “consists in its being a vital and integral part of the process of intersubjective life, at once the bodily expression of one's need for autonomy and the means of restoring control when the boundary between ego and alter becomes so confused that one risks annihilation in otherness.”
(Ultimately, Jackson does an
extremely pleasurable Moonwalk all up and down on the colonial condescension of those European scholars who, in previous centuries, took African fetishism as a sign of inferiority and cultural primitivity, motivated in part by the problematics of their own inferior and primitive definition of “human being.” As Jackson notes, “they protested too much.... [F]etishism, as a stratagem of existential control, inevitably makes its appearance in the field of subject-object relations, whether this is between persons and things or solely between persons.”)
I would like to think of religion, on the one hand, as a technology of determining the boundaries of people and communities. This is hard, because of course we begin and end everywhere, or at least in a great many places. The simultaneities and cascading polyphonies of breathing through culture’s ordeals. The undrawable diagrams of in & out. The phone is ringing. Hello.
I would like to think of poetry as an instrument of this kind of religion. I think back on the
prounikos, the bearer, the distributed impulse toward intersubjectivity. Poems and
kandu li fannu can both be ways of extending oneself, of raising ontological skirmishes on the borders between one person and another and the inanimate world. They open the self to a radical hibridity that seems wildly exotic – because what could be stranger than to be fully imprisoned in the walnut shell of one’s skull, while simultaneously existing in forms of experience entirely shaped and propelled by the forces of culture exterior to and predating it – but at the same time intensely ordinary – because what could be more normal?
In
The Emergence of Social Space, Kristin Ross writes about some other mutual interference ideas of the human and the inanimate exert over each other. In 1871, in
Ce qu'on dit au poète à propos de fleurs, Rimbaud writes
Look! This is the Infernal Age!
And telegraph poles
Will adorn -- a lyre that sings a song of steel
The splendor of your shoulder blades.
In this verse, Ross, notes, amid the mania for the sciences (especially geography) sweeping France at the time, “the poet’s body is directly implicated in the change in production and reproduction... permeated with apparatus-like elements not unlike the way, for example, the language of telegraphy is used in popular nineteenth-century scientific texts whenever the nervous system is described.”
I love the idea of a poetics that attempts, amid the strobing discontinuity of experience, to hear and revoice the intersubjectivities that animate it. It seems to me we have never been so much like telegraphy as we are now. We submerse ourselves endlessly in half-manageable streams of ones and zeros, beset by the ambiguity of whether they’re carrying us towards one another, or away from. We surrender to endless ratios, allowing real parts of our actual selves to be merged into pools of data nobody can read, and then hope to reassemble ourselves from whatever we can hoist back out of it.
Lisa Robertson’s newest book, an amazing long poem called
Cinema of the Present, begins:
What is the condition of a problem if you are the problem?
You move into the distributive texture of an experimental protocol.
A bunch of uncanniness emerges.
At 20 hertz it becomes touch.
A concomitant gate.
At the middle of your life on a Sunday.
Throughout the poem, Robertson interweaves selves and instrumentalities in a braided, lyric interrogation of how thought emerges. The poem consists of two voices that exist in unstable relation, tumbling over one another, repeating, negating, commemorating, and transforming each other in the complexity of emergent language. They interpellate but also undermine one another, sometimes simultaneously, in the direction of a stable, unified articulation that often feels like it’s glowing just over the horizon of the present page but never arrives. The flickering selves that fleetingly emerge as the apparent sources of the poem’s voices often seem to reach out toward the objects of their address through a technological language in which subjectivities mingle with both other subjectivities and the inert matter of various formal languages.
Still there was no solution for the fabulous problem.
Your formal discretion expressed itself in the non-convergence of identity with itself.
The grand law empties you of preference.
Your goodness lifts like a cock.
The I-speaker on your silken rupture spills into history.
Your historical pleasure was metrically interrupted by the inadequacies of terminology.
Then you keep spilling.
Your intellect works only among tactile traces.
You’re good at it.
Your interior is all exterior.
The self is rendered mechanically here, but the mechanical is rendered discursively. Which, fuck yeah. Where does a person begin and end? Or a thought? This poem is a protective/enclosing thing, only instead of reinstating a disempowered will, it seems to reinstate an interrupted curiosity, a deep interrogation of thinking that protests too much or is too much protested. “You twined your whole vocabulary of love into a wreath and this was it.”
More on this thought in future posts!
-IAN DREIBLATT
Ian Dreiblatt is a poet and translator. His poems have appeared in Elderly, Bomblog, Web Conjunctions, Pallaksch. Pallaksch., The Agriculture Reader, and Sink Review, among other places. His most recent translations are of Gogol's The Nose (Melville House, 2014) and Comradely Greetings, the prison correspondence of Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. His translations of composer Victoria Poleva's writings are forthcoming in Music & Literature magazine, and he has contributed translations of early Soviet texts in museum theory to the forthcoming Avant-Garde Museology (e-flux, 2015). His sonnets was published last year by Metambesen, and Barishonah, a letterpress-printed chapbook, is forthcoming this spring from DoubleCross Press. 
I would like to think of religion, on the one hand, as a technology of determining the boundaries of people and communities. This is hard, because of course we begin and end everywhere, or at least in a great many places. The simultaneities and cascading polyphonies of breathing through culture’s ordeals. The undrawable diagrams of in & out. The phone is ringing. Hello.
I would like to think of poetry as an instrument of this kind of religion. I think back on the prounikos, the bearer, the distributed impulse toward intersubjectivity. Poems and kandu li fannu can both be ways of extending oneself, of raising ontological skirmishes on the borders between one person and another and the inanimate world. They open the self to a radical hibridity that seems wildly exotic – because what could be stranger than to be fully imprisoned in the walnut shell of one’s skull, while simultaneously existing in forms of experience entirely shaped and propelled by the forces of culture exterior to and predating it – but at the same time intensely ordinary – because what could be more normal?
In The Emergence of Social Space, Kristin Ross writes about some other mutual interference ideas of the human and the inanimate exert over each other. In 1871, in Ce qu'on dit au poète à propos de fleurs, Rimbaud writes
Look! This is the Infernal Age!
And telegraph poles
Will adorn -- a lyre that sings a song of steel
The splendor of your shoulder blades.
In this verse, Ross, notes, amid the mania for the sciences (especially geography) sweeping France at the time, “the poet’s body is directly implicated in the change in production and reproduction... permeated with apparatus-like elements not unlike the way, for example, the language of telegraphy is used in popular nineteenth-century scientific texts whenever the nervous system is described.”
I love the idea of a poetics that attempts, amid the strobing discontinuity of experience, to hear and revoice the intersubjectivities that animate it. It seems to me we have never been so much like telegraphy as we are now. We submerse ourselves endlessly in half-manageable streams of ones and zeros, beset by the ambiguity of whether they’re carrying us towards one another, or away from. We surrender to endless ratios, allowing real parts of our actual selves to be merged into pools of data nobody can read, and then hope to reassemble ourselves from whatever we can hoist back out of it.
Lisa Robertson’s newest book, an amazing long poem called Cinema of the Present, begins:
What is the condition of a problem if you are the problem?
You move into the distributive texture of an experimental protocol.
A bunch of uncanniness emerges.
At 20 hertz it becomes touch.
A concomitant gate.
At the middle of your life on a Sunday.
Throughout the poem, Robertson interweaves selves and instrumentalities in a braided, lyric interrogation of how thought emerges. The poem consists of two voices that exist in unstable relation, tumbling over one another, repeating, negating, commemorating, and transforming each other in the complexity of emergent language. They interpellate but also undermine one another, sometimes simultaneously, in the direction of a stable, unified articulation that often feels like it’s glowing just over the horizon of the present page but never arrives. The flickering selves that fleetingly emerge as the apparent sources of the poem’s voices often seem to reach out toward the objects of their address through a technological language in which subjectivities mingle with both other subjectivities and the inert matter of various formal languages.
Still there was no solution for the fabulous problem.
Your formal discretion expressed itself in the non-convergence of identity with itself.
The grand law empties you of preference.
Your goodness lifts like a cock.
The I-speaker on your silken rupture spills into history.
Your historical pleasure was metrically interrupted by the inadequacies of terminology.
Then you keep spilling.
Your intellect works only among tactile traces.
You’re good at it.
Your interior is all exterior.
The self is rendered mechanically here, but the mechanical is rendered discursively. Which, fuck yeah. Where does a person begin and end? Or a thought? This poem is a protective/enclosing thing, only instead of reinstating a disempowered will, it seems to reinstate an interrupted curiosity, a deep interrogation of thinking that protests too much or is too much protested. “You twined your whole vocabulary of love into a wreath and this was it.”
More on this thought in future posts!
-IAN DREIBLATT
Ian Dreiblatt is a poet and translator. His poems have appeared in Elderly, Bomblog, Web Conjunctions, Pallaksch. Pallaksch., The Agriculture Reader, and Sink Review, among other places. His most recent translations are of Gogol's The Nose (Melville House, 2014) and Comradely Greetings, the prison correspondence of Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. His translations of composer Victoria Poleva's writings are forthcoming in Music & Literature magazine, and he has contributed translations of early Soviet texts in museum theory to the forthcoming Avant-Garde Museology (e-flux, 2015). His sonnets was published last year by Metambesen, and Barishonah, a letterpress-printed chapbook, is forthcoming this spring from DoubleCross Press.