Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

My wife had raved about Edwidge Danticat‘s writing for years, and finally, on a couch on Maui, I read Krik? Krak! in a couple days.  Again, I am confirmed in my decision not to do a doctorate: the freedom to read widely is a real help to my understanding of the world and one which I would not have were I a specialist.  The book is a collection of short stories, most of which take place in Haiti, the country of Danticat’s birth.  She emigrated to New York City (a city about which I have had numerous dreams recently, for some reason), and writes in English, interestingly.  I had assumed, picking up the book, that I would read a translation.

All of Danticat’s subjects are working-class.  I have a feeling–forgive the lack of citations: this piece is not that kind of project–that much of the critical response to this book in the United States viewed the stories in an essentially, if veiled, racialized view of the developing world and patterns of immigration.  I myself have been guilty of seeing some fundamental unity among people in developing countries: somehow, before moving to Senegal, I had felt like “the Senegalese” was actually a meaningful concept.  When I lived there, I came to realize that we had a) the Senegalese people, and b) the Senegalese elite, and possibly a c) Senegalese trying to enter the elite.  I had never been in such a classist society, or at least not for a long enough time to really notice.

Danticat focuses to my memory (I finished the book nearly a month ago now) almost no attention on race, despite the fact, of which she is certainly aware, that her work in this country is categorized racially.  I suppose this helps one understand the destructive absurdity of race in the United States.  Almost entirely focused on class (and gender, one could suggest, though I wouldn’t), she inevitably is categorized racially.  This isn’t to suggest that her book is not fundamentally reflective of a particular aspect of the Black diaspora–Haitian revolutionary consciousness plays a fairly significant role in at least one of the stories–but that white critical types tend to think that the Black diaspora is always about race.

The back cover stresses that Danticat’s protagonists tend to be woman, and in the last, longest story she covers one woman’s marriage, a rite of passage to be sure, from a sister’s perspective.  All this is marketing.  In my writing I tend toward male protagonists, and this is certainly a flaw.  I do this because I’m male and in my life I live as a man.  It’s not a surprise that I tend to write male characters.  Danticat tends to write about women.  None of this is to suggest that Danticat is not entirely conscious of the political implications of writing about women: she obviously is.  That said, were I to point to a particular theme throughout the stories, their class analysis comes to the fore, not at the expense of anything else to be sure.  I am sure, however, that Danticat gets very little attention for documenting the lives of working-class Haitians, and quite a lot for documenting the lives of Haitian women.  The two of course are the same people, just complex as all people are.

There are two points.  The first is that Danticat, because of who she is, cannot avoid in the market place the various labels that are inevitably applied to her.  Given the context, I assume that she embraces them as well she should.  A corollary to this point is that, just as sure as Danticat can’t avoid labels, they won’t be applied to me in terms of my identity.  Rather, I am labeled by what I do: “singer-songwriter,” which is basically factual.  That said, the second point: neither Danticat nor myself can avoid the political implications of who and what we write about.  Writing about anything has political consequences, and the start to dealing with this well is to be conscious of it.

New Tune, “Coyote on Valencia”

“Coyote on Valencia” from Garageband Demos 2009-2010.

Lyrics, in .pdf, with chords.

My velvet blazer and my whiskers waxed
I tip my top-hat as I cross the tracks
Without copper coin or greenbacks
My paws patter on the blacktop
Leave no reflection passing window panes
Nor no impression passing peoples’ brains
I slip between the cars and bike lanes
That litter this, my creation

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone in the Financial District
You’ll have company inside the station at 24th St.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone on the Big Red Bridge
You’ll see long ago footprints in Dolores Park

I catch inarticulate infants’ eyes
I read the forms in that clouded sky
I see the metal buildings gone too high
While crouching down on the pavement
Despite that history hunting on my track
I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re taking the T
You’ll have so much company you won’t know what to do with it.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re cursing the Mayor’s office
You’ll see any number of brown eyes staring back at you

When the paper reads the Mission burned
White Jesus gone, Father Serra spurned
You’ll know that I took my turn
Though it was too long in coming

I feel I take a bit of a pass on writing for 2009, because I recorded Adieu, False Heart, printed it up (such as I did), and dealt with other musical things, like performance and getting my web situation to something that fits my life at this point.  I do have a number of little ideas for tunes built up from last year, but the fact remains that I completed no new tunes in 2009.  I began this one, but only got the first verse and a bit of the second last year, and a start on the second part–”Sneaking through windows and doors,” etc.  The third part, the chorus such as it is (I’m not using these terms scientifically) had been a wisp of a melody I’d had in my head for years but which connected to this tune on the last day of a meditation retreat I attended over winter break.

I read Vine Deloria‘s God is Red a couple years ago, and it had a big impact on how I see things.  Particularly powerful was a lengthy except from a speech Chief Seattle gave in 1854 or 1855, here shortened to the relevant passage:

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

It will be noted that eminent historians working for the National Archives have questioned the existence of the speech:

The dubious and murky origins of Chief Seattle’s alleged “Unanswered Challenge” renders it useless as supporting evidence.  The historical record suggests that the compliant and passive individual named Seattle is not recognizable in the image of the defiant and angry man whose words reverberate in our time.

I’ll go with Vine Deloria over some white hack working for the Federal Government any day of the week.  The paper is worth a gander, if only to dismiss it more specifically.  What we have here is one of a long series of examples of white academics and intellectuals trying to determine the meaning of, in this case, Indian people’s past.  Among other things, a dead giveaway for Jerry Clark’s intellectual bankruptcy: “angry man.”  Chief Seattle comes across as many things in the speech, but angry is not one of them.  If I had a dime for every time some white person called a non-angry non-white person angry…

Clark, of course, not wanting, as an employee of the Federal Government, the institution most responsible for the destruction of Indian societies in North America, and a beneficiary of that slaughter, to deal with the substance of the words.  They mean something to Deloria for a reason.  Rather than understand that reason, the argument is changed from a political to a technical one.  Clark–in Clark’s own mental world–here has the home-field advantage.  If I don’t know it, he thinks as a National Archivist, it therefore must not exist.  This is absolutely typical of white academia particularly as it examines non-white people.  We are the ones who truly know your history.

I have a pretty simple rule when looking at the past: I try to find out what peoples say about their own history as a starting point, and proceed from there.  Control of the narrative has to remain with the subjects, so to speak, of the story.  This is particularly true in North America, as in any settler colony.

There’s a litmus test to apply to any such debate about history and evidence.  When the white scholar lectures the non-white scholar or person about objectivity (broadly put), you know the white scholar is the villain, and that an attempt to maintain white control over the meaning of the past is in play.  Viz. Philip Curtain:

I note a curious anti-empiricist tone to some of the recent postings concerning the slave trade from Goree.

Where the tune differs with Chief Seattle is that it doesn’t posit the disappearance of native people:

I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

Credit where credit is due: our friend, Nellie, refers to the Golden Gate as “the Big Red Bridge.”  I cribbed the line for this tune.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I don’t read books as quickly as I seem to be writing posts about them.  I work with a couple of students who for various reasons can’t attend regular school, and one in particular is very bright and curious.  At our first meeting I pointed out that for her English credit we could either read from the regular English textbook or choose novels.  She thankfully chose to read a novel.  It turns out she, as a high school freshman, had read both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and had Down and Out in Paris and London on her shelf ready to read.  I’d never read it, so I agreed happily to read it as well.

I haven’t read much Orwell, and as an adult had only read “Shooting an Elephant,” which I taught for a few years.  I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school, but that was long enough ago that I can’t think that I have anything intelligent to say about them.  “Shooting an Elephant” impressed, though I know well that its perspective is limited and that regardless of Orwell’s intent it is, even if polemically anti-imperialist, ontologically imperialist.  One imagines, or hopes at least, that Orwell would own up to that.  Regardless, it impressed, and not just for its prose style.  Orwell was a proper socialist, fundamentally humane, and himself aware of his coming-to-awareness of the absolute awfulness of capitalism, in this case in its colonialist manifestation.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a semi-autobiography or autobiographical novel, for lack of a better term.  More important is that the writing has a palpable authenticity to it.  Orwell did indeed know poverty, the analytical subject of the text, first-hand.  He comments here and there, a few times at length, that those who don’t know poverty or poor people directly are more or less inevitably prone to misunderstand the matter.  It’s very true.

The book jibed very well with the Marx we’re currently engaged with in my reading group.  In particular–and I have this sense that this is more applicable to London than Paris, and possibly more to the United States than England–one sees how poverty and therefore class is, regardless of all the rhetoric about social mobility, a closed system.  There is nothing in a capitalist economy that exists to faciliate social mobility upward, only down.  One sees this again and again in Orwell, in concrete situations.

I came to the realization a while ago that while I get a lot out of reading history, and while therefore I’ve read a lot of it, I do well to balance historical or theoretical writings with novels.  One gets a feel for things with novels that one does not get with any work of history or theory.  This isn’t an original observation, but I’ve re-learned that it’s true in the last six months, when I’ve spent a lot of time with novels.

Last: I don’t need to say too much about the anti-semitism and homophobia that pop into the book every now and again.  It’s a problem.

“Body & Soul”

“Body & Soul” (1997) from The Bathroom Mirror.

“Body & Soul (live)” (2005) from Live at Keith Danner’s House.

I smell my pillow and I hear a sound.
My eyelids open and I’m earthward bound.
Pretty soon the sisters wheel me around.
“Body & Soul.”

It’s Tuesday morning so they wash my hair.
The interns greet me as I pass the stair.
I start to mumble and the sisters hear a prayer.
“Body & Soul.”

I hear the Father‘s footsteps up and down the hall.
He’ll take all morning but he’ll see us all.
I hear him whisper and I hear him call.
“Body & Soul.”

The dishes break and then a rolling train goes by.
My head jerks backward and I shut my eye.
My head sees Heaven and the swirling angels sigh.
“Body & Soul.”

The sunburnt courtyard.  The dusty hill.
The metal grating on my windowsill.
The wooden beads and all these crushed-up pills.
“Body & Soul.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tune lately, as I’m going to perform it in a couple weeks and I believe I will be able to convince my harmonica-playing pal, Colin, to up and join me on this one and likely a few others.  He and I played for the first time in 20 years last spring, noted in a previous post on “Full Tank of Gas,” and when I went to his pad one afternoon about a month later this was one of the things we did.  Predictably, it worked well.

One could argue these things, but I don’t think I’ve written a better tune that would fall into the “blues” category than “’Body & Soul.’”  Interestingly, I’ve also not written a tune that I can recall that so completely resists orchestration of any sort.  The House Carpenters recorded this one evening as we taped our rehearsal, and while I was fairly pleased with the results, nobody else liked it.  Most likely, it was the tune I was happy with, not the arrangement.

More than one person, in praising my tunes, has pointed out that I give a sense of place in them, and I’ve always felt I couldn’t get a higher compliment.  I read Vine Deloria’s God is Red a couple years ago, and it really had an impact on me, aside from being a pure pleasure to read because of his prose.  Contrasting Christianity as it is practiced in North America with a generalized Indian—that is, North American Indigenous—religious practice, the fundamental distinction is that North American Christianity has totally abstracted itself from any sense of place while Indian practice is entirely predicated on the specificity of place.  I’ve thought a lot about that, and it really seems to me that things would improve a lot in this country if we (collectively) started to deal with the specificity of place as well as deal with dreams, as in dreaming consciousness.

The place in the tune is specific, if imagined.  There is not to my knowledge any Catholic hospital in Riverside, CA that offers the kind of care described in the tune.  I don’t even think there’s a Catholic hospital.  That said, the land is absolutely there.  The “dusty hills” are the same as in “The Man From Manila”:

These hills rise above me, devoid of all plant life.

The live version of the tune, above, was recorded at a house concert just below those hills as I imagine them in both of these tunes.

I have at times introduced this tune as a blues number about mind/body dualism.  I don’t actually buy into the concept, I’d state clearly, but I imagine that someone who is quadriplegic would find great meaning in it even if one rejected the idea ultimately.  It would seem to reflect one’s life.  It’s interesting to me that some people are placed by circumstance to live in a totally existential sense, certain philosophical or religious concepts that I learned about in school or read in books.  I saw this a lot in Senegal, where I knew some deeply spiritual people, in a very true sense, but also who at some level had so little materially that it seemed that they almost–I know how problematic it is putting this way, but the sense is still there–had no choice but to detach from material things.

I’d read in the few years before I wrote this tune a lot of William Blake, as well as some critical literature on him and his work alongside a biography.  So, Blake had visions.  Of interest to me was a contrast between people who placed his visions into scientific categories–he suffered from some sort of mental illness which may or may not have played a role in his economic difficulties–and those who simply reported that he had visions.  E.P. Thompson, whom I’d discovered in grad school and really liked, wrote what was for him a short book on Blake, and placed him in his very specific religious context, that of radical London religious dissent, that is to say, Protestant but not Church of England, and very much in tune with notions of individual revelation, rather than ecclesiastical authority.  Not only Blake had visions, but lots of people in the fair number or small churches he attended did.  It’s just what you did when you were a radical English religious dissenter in the eighteenth century.

It’s really troubling to me when I look, from the outside, at Christianity in the United States, though by no means is the following characterization applicable to individual Christians or all churches.  It seems as secular a phenomenon as I could dream up, because it seems more of a social network or social identity then a means to some actual, experiential spiritual or religious anything.  The social network aspect of it can manifest in very good and important ways, as in for example The Catholic Worker movement, or in the business cards I’d find on my door in Riverside for gardeners offering their services, cards with the Christian fish symbol on it.  I imagine that putting that symbol on the card actually worked to drum up business.  The social aspect of modern American Christianity can be seen of course in its most negative aspects as well in some of the hatred people spew in the name of religion, and though I’m well aware that this is a virulent minority I also know that it’s very important to pay close attention to these people.

The tune, to bring the digression above back to the song, contrasts the nuns and priest, who obviously do good work but who are going about their day in a world that seems to them to be exactly as it appears, with the main figure in the tune, who has ecstatic visions.  I suppose that in my life that the satisfactions I’ve found become fewer and fewer as I go up the chain of any hierarchy.  I appreciate Blake more than I do any Christian leaders, and I appreciate that Hui Neng was an illiterate woodcutter.  I had a professor at Pitzer who taught the Tao Te Ching, and when going over the passage that reads something like, “the Tao is like water: it seeks the low places that men disdain,” he asked, “isn’t this a loser philosophy?”  He then added, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”