An open letter to Dionne Brand (See www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/brand/)
Re: Inventories, as selected by Leslie C. Sanders in Fierce Departures
The bodies piling up, the
repeated small numbers: “two…five…two, two…one…two…five…five…” then a
double-digit number, repeated: “twenty-seven…twenty-seven – again, twenty-seven…”
The rhythm, the casual counting, is almost soothing, like counting sheep, so I
almost forget we are counting human bodies, until you remind me these are the
dead-by-violence, the bodies of real people in the middle of being alive, “beating dust
from slippers…an idea in their head like figs will soon/ be in season…” and I
feel one of them could be me. I could disappear this second because of the
madness of human choices, or I could be the one to trigger the explosive
device. Mine could be, or be the cause of, “the rain of small glittering
teeth.” Who are we? “We believed in
nothing,” you say in the opening line of the complete poem, and so, it seems,
violence finds its way into the empty space of that unbelief. “the black and
white american movies/ buried themselves in our chests,/…lit in the drawing
rooms,/ the suicides inside us.”
The image of a woman
watching television, “one year…no reason,” tallying the victims of that
violence is brilliant, Dionne. We all are that woman, though we don’t all weep
with her. We push the violence on to “the other,” remove ourselves from cause,
and see only effect. See it as distant from ourselves, see it as entertainment,
unreal: “the news was advertisement for movies,/ the movies were the real
killings.” Another advantage of the television metaphor is that it is global.
This works best in the whole poem, which takes us to the Middle East, the United States, Europe.
We have to say, this is human; I have
to say, this is my problem, this is in me.
I especially like the way your
narrative works. I’m never entirely certain who’s speaking – the woman
watching, the speaker narrating, the television reporting. It’s like being in a
room with others while the TV’s on. When I read, “all this became ordinary far
from where it happened,” I’m pretty sure it’s the speaker commenting, but when
I read, “we’re/ doing the best we can with these people,/ what undeniable
hatred fuels them, what else/ can we do, nothing but maim them// we do not
deserve it, it’s out of the blue,” I don’t know if it’s the woman’s naïve
thinking, the speaker’s bitter irony, or the television’s slanted reporting.
The impact on me is to make me examine my own value system. What do I think? Am
I prepared to “maim” other humans because I judge them? If I am, then I am not
apart from, but a part of, the violence of our era. Our era that is “like
chaos.”
Perhaps a better, or
clearer, way to explain how I see your narrative is that it seems like a
three-way conversation between the woman, the television and the speaker, a
conversation that I am privy to. When I become numb from the inventory of the
dead, the speaker reminds me of the humanity of those listed, who are going
about their simple human business, perhaps “threading a needle,” “reading,” or
“fumbling for candles.” The effect is to bring me back from the place of
desensitized emptiness, and allow me to weep with the woman. It is the speaker
who tells me the woman is weeping, “one year.” Tells me she “sits devoted, the
paring knife close/ to a harvest of veins,” and tells me of “the wine/ she makes sitting
there/ pressing and pressing these bundles of dried blooms.” Her pain in the
suffering she sees reminds me that this world is real, and that it matters,
that there is reason to read your anthem, that my passionate attention to your
words tells me I am a member of a species whose deaths “count,” even though I
carry metal and fire in my chest.
Metal and fire are two of
the images you repeat through this section of Inventories. Both serve literally and figuratively. There are the
“twisted metal hulks of things that used to be” and there is “the metal, metal,
metal of waiting” for the next deaths. There are “fires intense as black
holes,” and there is the irony of “ reasonable suspicion… charred by home
improvements,/ self-makeovers, what goes for conscience now.” The way you link
beautiful or ordinary natural images with horrifying or sad human-made events
and things grips me: “petals of nails;” “rain of small glittering teeth;”
“she’ll gather the nerve endings/ spilled on the streets,/ she’ll count them
like rice grains;" “the unemployment lines are runny/ like broken eggs.” I move more and more deeply into grief because
the vulnerable natural images contrast what might be, what ought to be, with
what is.
Finally, your rhetoric
brilliantly reflects your vision, too. It is as broken as our world.
Disconnected events, famous names, personal experiences, allusions, quotations: all drop in, drop out. You begin almost no line with a capital letter, end no
sentence with a period. Fragments pile up and up, like the bodies they
adumbrate. Your stanzas are of no specific length, either, although in this
section none is longer than five lines. The effect is like the rhythm of sound
bites on television, or of the weeping of the watching woman. I find this very
powerful, Dionne. I notice that each line also fluctuates in length, from two words
to as many as fourteen. You take me into a place I don’t want to go, a place of
insanity where “the centre cannot hold.”
You’ll notice, I’m guessing,
that I’ve used the descriptor “brilliant” several times. Inventories is brilliant, in that it is a work of genius, but the
word is not quite the word I’m looking for. It’s too hard, and this poem is not
hard. It hurts, profoundly, but it engages the soul as much as it does the
mind. Inventories involves me, makes
me see myself in this time, in the same way I imagine Whitman’s Leaves of Grass reflected the people of
the mid-Nineteenth Century back to themselves, or Ginsberg’s Howl told us truth in the last century.
You, too, tell us the huge truth of ourselves. Somehow you contain the horror
of our madness in “the atomic openings in [your] chest,” as you “revise and
revise this bristling list,/ hourly.” Thank you. Thank you for your vision,
your great soul, both shared so potently in Inventories.
