Читать книгу Bury My Clothes - Roger Bonair-Agard - Страница 4

Foreword

. . . the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted . . .

—Derek Walcott

Punk rock, new wave and soul,

Pop music, salsa, rock and roll,

Calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues,

Mastermix those number-one tunes.

—MC G.L.O.B.E.

The new American poet thinks in many tongues . . .

—Meena Alexander

For one thing, Bury My Clothes uncovers histories, violence, rhythms, fusions, and disjunctions that have been previously hidden in our received traditions. For another, Roger Bonair-Agard, with his third full-length poetry collection, is asking who and what exactly gets damned, who does the damning, how. And of what remains, who and what are we going to call holy? All of which brings me to two things I know about the word calypso: (1) the European etymology of the word has a Greek root that means “to conceal” or “to hide”; (2) calypso shares that same etymology with the word hell.

In part, Bury My Clothes is a story of political and personal rage. It uncovers and damns and praises not just the quintessence of rage (which is chaotic and dull) but the story of what rage makes and what it bloody breaks. What rage can do with and without love.

And if you were lucky you had some money

left over for dress pants too because John

was sick with a needle and thread, even

if he did once beat his wife so badly, she had to run

naked into the yard and we wondered why

she couldn’t just run away from a man

with a lick-foot. (“Back to School”)

Scenes like this strobe throughout the book, complicating the speaker’s moral stance and his male privilege. It is a deep examination of a young man’s prolonged adolescent vanities and brutality. The insistent question for Bonair-Agard is how to become a good man.

There is no such thing as kindness and cruelty in pure form. They been grinding their hips together for so long, sometimes we can’t tell one from the other. The heroes who stride through this collection are never without trouble. And it seems it is the trouble that makes them—as well as the slick music of their speech, which seems to be attuned to the music of their living.

There is the speaker’s encounter with Roaring Lion, calypsonian who sang the song from which Bonair-Agard epigraphs the first section. There are the men at the bar who christen the young man into a world where rum is sacrament, where a young man learns grit, where he hones his proper bearing among elders. There is the father over the phone in the middle of a government-instituted “state of emergency” who is at risk of being picked up for being black, who can’t simply say “I’m afraid,” because those aren’t the rules. A father of a certain stature and comportment doesn’t say those things. But a poet. A poet does. As does Bonair-Agard. A poet troubles the silence.

If the father won’t unknot the tie, remove the jacket, and unbutton his perfectly pressed shirt, then the son will strip down to his own black skin—in public, in America. The poet is a fool for the truth, a goddamned fool for the bare body of the truth as well as for the truth of the body. The book is a stripping down. It enacts a freedom the father does not have. There is a dimension of speech the father will not (probably cannot) test. But the speaker (who becomes a poet) will immerse himself.

Over time, of course, women are the ones to school the speaker on how to be a man. A mother, for example, who

accosted our father at his lover’s house

and he tried to beat her, but rather found himself, in a fistfight;

my mother turning over tables and lamps

smashing anything she could, swinging like a woman

insulted by even the idea of being beaten by a man

and a grandmother who “collared [her husband] in her massive stone fists // and heaved him into a corner, so my mother could not be abused.”

We shouldn’t be beguiled into thinking that the mother’s lesson in manhood is just in fists, for these are the violent exceptions to an education she gives the speaker about agency, power, and the beauty of one’s own dark body. She chastises a sister (or cousin) who has shaved off the speaker’s hair:

This is when I knew black was a city

whose walls were constantly under siege.

This is when I knew what hymns

were meant for—that they were

songs of anoint for the body

that was constantly at war

And then my mother rose up saying:

♦

Of course it’s wooly. I have lain only with black men, men whose skin was the darkest black, men whose hair was the roughest wire and they were beautiful, and my child’s hair is this way because I have never, like you, lain with anyone light skin or even remotely Chinese. And my child is beautiful, wooly, black

This book is about the way a generation passes knowledge along to the next—or how they keep knowledge to themselves. The men and women who raise the speaker from childhood to manhood belong to the same generation as Growling Tiger: “When I dead bury me clothes.” The clothes are this calypsonian’s style, his look. And the commerce of the Western world has made him want to own it, to make sure no one else can lay claim to it. It didn’t always have to be that way. Knowledge, style, song—they all used to be passed down. But now—bury the body. Bury the clothes. Even bury what the singer and fighter can no longer wear.

Of course, Bonair-Agard was raised during the rich early days of hip-hop. And what do DJs—the grand conductors of the cosmic dance floor—teach us? The art of digging. In some ways, it’s a shame we now use the word remix or mashup. The epic sets of Marley Marl, Kid Capri, the Latin Rascals, and many, many other DJs used to be called mastermixes, so named because of the DJs’ mastery—their excellence in mixing sounds and beats from different recordings, vinyl, tape, found sound, et cetera. However, those DJs were also mixing the masters: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. This European music—called virtuosic, sophisticated, and “classical”—was also the arsenal used by critics to disparage the abundant musical invention of people of color. But if they put the masters on wax, it was the DJs who could scratch, fade, chirp, chop them into something new.

In this way Bonair-Agard’s poems are an ode and a contradiction. The poet honors the tradition of Growling Tiger, but in redeeming and recalling it must challenge it. The DJ digs through crates and closets and basements, through trash piles—cemetery after cemetery of sound. What the world has rid itself of, condemned to obsolescence, buried, the DJ revives, reuses, remixes. This is to say, Bonair-Agard draws from so many varied sources; he samples from a variety of texts. Roger Bonair-Agard digs. You could say he unburies.

You could say he also mixes the masters. He writes in English. He makes references to Shakespeare. But the lines are enjambed against convention; Lil Wayne keeps showing up, so do signifying penguins; images of the body in making love, violence, silence, and speech abound. This is the tradition of hip-hop—to juxtapose the unlikely—but it is also the tradition of calypso. Where the steelpan was once an oil drum, it is now cut open and contains all the desire, ache, fucking, hollers, tenderness, hymns, and mischief of a people: “That quietness underneath the bamboo knocking, the steel have that too, so the steel is my master.”

And steel, which was retooled to make music (and which therefore remixed its own master: oil), is part of Bonair-Agard’s own remix. So whenever the masters show up in these poems, one gets the feeling they are going to get put on a platter and crosscut to new acoustics:

The cicadas in the trees? God can’t send enough

crows to silence their plague. They’ve been singing

since May. They know who their master is.

Is that cicada chatter a sound of terror or is it an uprising against the seasons? The seasons are their master, but the cicadas have also mastered the seasons. And they make ruckus in their mastering.

Then there is this other thing I learned about the etymology of the word calypso. It may also come from a French word—or it might come from a Spanish word. It’s also likely it comes from a word in Efik or Hausa or Ibibio, a word—spoken, shouted, and sung during gayelle—used to urge stick-fighters on. The rhythms, call and response, and melodies that we hear in “When I Dead Bury Me Clothes” are derived from the stick-fighting circle. Growling Tiger’s song is a battle cry. I don’t know who the song is being sung for—the calypsonian himself? the fighter in the gayelle? or for the poet? This is significant, because the very tension of history resides inside the etymology of the word calypso: to conceal and unveil and urge forward and call toward. It means many things at once. Inside the history of a word for a music that is both a song and a fight, there is a history of our own submerged wonder, our most awful selves. It’s a good thing, then, that the poet “knows the code” and

knows what

it means to have six simultaneous melodies

locked away forever. It is deep

in the calypso, this burying

of one’s best clothes.

It is good that Roger Bonair-Agard has inherited the US tradition of digging. In Bury My Clothes he proves, in order to reveal something of our most beautiful and banged-up selves, he is willing to go down into history time and time again—even through hell, even through a fight, and especially at the cost of singing. What follows in these pages is both the cost and the song.

Patrick Rosal

Brooklyn, New York

October 28, 2012