The Undiscover'd Country
"The fluent wrists."
What is the point of art? What does literature make happen? I have been working at some reviews for some weeks now, a book I am reviewing tries to assert the power of poetry to make things happen but it is itself a death, virtually nothing happens in the poems. The question of what literature does—what it “makes happen” (and I am paraphrasing Auden, in case you missed it)—has been on my mind for a long time. I wrote a newsletter asking the same question last year. It is probably important to me because I feel my duty as an artist contested, not only by the society I live in (comprising my contemporaries), but even by the church.
Another question that has been on my mind, associated with the question of art’s use, is the question of idolatry. A mentor of mine, a Christian, once said to me that writing was my idol. My attitude to the statement was rude, and of course. But my response may have been proof that perhaps it was, though I think that overstretches it. I have been writing since I was 17, published my first piece at that age; and I have written or thought about literature nearly every day since I first wrote a thing. It was a real idol for me until I came to Christ, led me down every path I went. Lola Shoneyin once said, at a workshop, “To be a writer, you must live”—and, boy, did I live? I usually kind of blame her on this point, for those words, but she was only echoing many other writers. At the core of my life, then, was literature. Every other thing was an addition to it; every other thing fed my life as an artist. It was Appetite without base; I smoked, let Solomon’s deadly woman make a mockery of me, and did drugs. Hunger.
Associated with the question of writing-as-idol is another question, which has resulted from something said by the same person who suggested that writing might be an idol. What if God does not want me to write? What if that is not what He wants me to do? I mean, what if the life of a professor is not the life I was created for? I could be an intellectual, but perhaps at the pulpit. Or I could be a missionary. These questions make my heart quiver. But they must be entertained, engaged, closely and carefully. I like to think that there is much to be done in literature, and I have my part to play. I started reading A. E. Stallings’s 1999 collection, Archaic Smile, and I came across a poem that says to me what God might say, “You take yourself too seriously, Ernest. There will always be someone else who can do it, you will not be missed.”
Death, the deportation officer,
Has seen your papers and found them wanting.
Discrepancies in why you came to visit:
Pleasure, you said, then business. Which is it?
Your intentions are not clear, but he suspects
That you are trying to stay here forever.
Your claim, that you cannot be replaced,
Holds no water. Others can pick the tomatoes,
Smell the gardens at sunset, stroke the cat,
Watch over your lover deep in a pillow of dreams.
You protest—so long ago, I cannot remember
Anything about where I came from. Not even the language.
They say but for dogs and buzzards the village is empty.
They say, there is no work. There is nothing to eat.
No phone, no way even to send a letter
To the girl I want to marry, waiting at home.
Your case is closed, he says, stamping your folder.
The others waiting in the holding cell
Assure you that the language will come back,
An uninflected tongue, without number or gender,
In which hello’s the same word as goodbye.
The italics in the second stanza is mine. I hope I have not done wrong by quoting the whole poem here. This poem is titled “From Whose Bourn No Traveller” and appears in the first section (titled “Underworld”) of the collection. The section’s poems happen in Hades, and they are so striking, written in a casual language that nevertheless comes alive and moves stones in my imagination. The people in the Underworld are real, they feel like us, complete with our anxieties; but they are not us. They don’t see well, they hear. They say that “the light is “loud””; their world is muddy, they do not work. They are also able to sit still. They love, too. The title of this poem is drawn from Hamlet and the borrowed line is ellipted. The line is taken from the well-known passage where Hamlet contemplates suicide—“To be, or not to be,—that is the question.” Shakespeare proceeds later in the same passage:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That the patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,—
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns,—puzzles the will. . .
I love Shakespeare but I confess that I have not read Hamlet; I searched the title of A. E. Stallings poem to see if I could find it, so I could embed a link to it in this piece and Shakespeare was everywhere. However, I have had to open my big, worn back, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, which, according to the note I left on the first page, I bought on 10 February 2017 for 1500 naira. (I remember where I bought it, at Panseke, and I remember that the 1500 was what I had saved from what my dad gave me to take to school; either that, or he gave me.) This passage, from which Stallings takes her title, illuminates Stallings poems incredibly. First, the poet banked on our knowledge of the passage: she expects that anyone who encounters the poem would complete the line that makes up the title, “from whose bourn no traveller returns.” I was in the dark about that title, wondered what it meant: bourn? Having no knowledge of the “subtext,” I wondered where the—I assume—young man tendering his deportation papers was: I thought he had perhaps come to the world of humans to visit, and he was asking not to be deported back to Hades, precisely because it was impossible for me to grasp a simple point at the center of the poem: that death is a door, it is not only the door that the dead walk through to Hades, it is the door that they would have to walk through if they must return to life. My mind could not grasp that death was not only the taker but the keeper of what it takes. This, it has occurred to me, is why the death and resurrection of Christ is so crucial. Whereas the man in this poem is asking to be “deported” back to life (a word (deported) that, now I understand, suggests that life is our true country, we are nationals of life; the poem rebels, in a subtle way, against the idea that we are pilgrims on earth, foreigners here; instead, it asserts, we belong here, and we are travelers in the “bourn” (realm) of death, death is a pastime, a holiday; but the poem also resists the idea that it cunningly asserts) and is refused deportation, Christ was successfully deported back to life. Now, not “deported” as in death made it happen, but “deported” as in death had no choice. Christ had no reason to tender papers, His visit to Hades was so that those of us who accept His work may evade Hades.
Here is something to note. Why does death reject this man’s papers? “Discrepancies in why you came to visit.” The word “visit” suggests that this young man perhaps did not think it through before he visited; also, the idea that “he came to visit” suggests that he died by suicide. This idea is consolidated by the passage the title is taken from, a passage about being, or not being. But why is death saying no to return the dead to life? One, it is impossible for death to do it. The portrayal of death in this poems gives the sense that there is something fishy about death. “Your intentions are not clear,” death (or the poetic voice) says. Note that this person has tendered “papers,” which could be metaphor for “evidence.” Death says, “Pleasure, you said, then business. Which is it?” This has to do with what the “papers” contain. However, the leap from what is before death’s eyes to what is in the man’s heart (“your intentions”) suggests the uncanny vision of death, he can see through you; but it also suggests that death is a fraud. Remember the scene in The Trial of the Chicago Seven, towards the movie’s end, where the guy says, “I have never been on trial for my thoughts before.” So what if death’s power lies in actually making us assume that he can see through us, while he uses that power to conceal his inability to actually return this young man to life? “Your intentions are not clear,” death sure sounds like a Nigerian policeman who wants to wrestle money from you by force.
But again, as I have noted, death is perhaps the other person who can put you own trial for your thoughts. If we agree that the young man died by suicide (he “came to visit” death, and as the subtext suggests), why did he do it? The subtext and the text of the poem suggest why. The young man gives a couple of reasons which reach their climax in the last two lines of the third stanza, “No phone, no way even to send a letter/ To the girl I want to marry, waiting at home.” In the passage from Hamlet, Shakespeare asks that who would bear “The pangs of despised love” without reaching for his death with “a bare bodkin”? Is it far-fetched to imagine that this young man killed himself because “the same girl I want to marry, waiting” is not actually waiting, but already rejected him? Of course, it is more than likely. He said earlier, “I cannot remember/ Anything about where I came from.” If he cannot remember anything, the girl he claims is waiting for him is not waiting. I am reminded of the brutal close to The Dark Knight, where the Batman assumes that Rachel Dawes loved him and perhaps is still thinking that she does, meanwhile her love had changed hands, she now loved Harvey Dent. The fact that Alfred Pennyworth burned the note, keeping the illusion alive for an eternity is perhaps what death does, it keeps the illusion alive. For the young man will always be in Hades and he will always assume that the young woman is waiting, until she too dies and joins him, and even then they will not know each other. Both of them will be strangers from, as I called it in a poem, “some far, forgotten country.” Also, the truth of the foreverness of that illusion is further enhanced by the fact that this poem reenacts “the little town”—in Stallings’s poem “the village”—in the fourth stanza of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” The town is coded on the body of the poem by its absence actually. Cleanth Brooks, in his essay on the poem by Keats, suggest that the town is an illusion, a fancy of Keats, no one will ever discover it (the undiscovered country), just as no one will ever discover the town in Stallings’s poem:
I cannot remember
Anything about where I came from. Not even the language.
They say but for dogs and buzzards the village is empty.
They say, there is no work. There is nothing to eat.
It feels like the poet is telling us about a village, but he has not told us anything in particular, this could be any village. Cleanth Brooks says of Keats’s poem, “the poet, by pretending to take the town as real—so real that he can imagine the effect of its silent streets upon the stranger who chances to come into it—has suggested in the most powerful way possible its essential reality for him—and for us. It is a case of the doctor’s taking his own medicine: the poet is prepared to stand by the illusion of his own making.” The young man describing the town believes his own fancy, it is what death has done to him. Is “the sleep of death” the gift of death? Is Stallings, as well as Keats, suggesting that to die is to exist in a state of real dreaming?
What is the point of art? Why do we make poems? Why literature? If my engagement in this essay has shown me anything it is that literature nourishes the life of the mind; it rattles us at a deep core; it pierces the ages and proves true today. Good literature is alive. Should Shakespeare have anything to say to me, the gulf of four hundred years between us? Stallings’s book was published before I was conceived. Literature is a network; Eliot said every truly new great work modifies the structure of that network. But that network is the network of consciousness. Literature is our primary heritage as a civilization. It is what Man does. He makes art. It is the breathing artefact of our endeavor. Pyramids are remarkable, they are lofty; but greater structures are built. Art doesn’t get better. Genesis 3 is in Soyinka’s “Abiku” and so is the psalm. Deuteronomy is there in JP Clark’s “Olokun” (“I am jealous and passionate/ Like Jehovah”) and Christ’s words to His disciples are in the poem, too (“no greater love had woman from man,” says Clark, “than the one I have for you). You think the story of gay boys in Nigerian universities is a rare achievement in terms of its freshness and then you read The Satyricon, written in the first century after the death and resurrection of Christ. I am learning all I can from Eliot; I am using Dante. Literature is a fellowship: and that is its point. It makes it possible for me to speak to you something which trembles lightly below your heart, unuttered. But when I say it to you, the little animal below your heart hears my voice and bristles awake. Yet I will not be the first to say it, but the “means” of its being said is me.
No phone, no way even to send a letter
To the girl I want to marry, waiting at home.
I love this woman, so much she makes me sentimental. I have loved her for so long, yet. I have tried to keep a distance, to not get committed. For many reasons. One, I don’t want to get distracted. Oh, man, I can get all worked up over a woman; I am like a pet who cannot let go of its gee. Two, I want to marry her and I think that we can wait. But why not date? I think dating is not biblical, and it isn’t. But things have changed. However, the language (“dating”) comes from the world (as the Bible calls the kingdom of darkness); I fear that what has come from the world will terrible consequences even if you were to “christianitize” it. But perhaps this is not true; not every Christian who dates fornicates, as I have been told, but most Christians who date do not end up marrying. And I have a little fear of losing this person to the flimsy affair of “I love you”-’s, the doing marriage before you are married. C. S. Lewis wrote about this in The Screwtape Letters, you are supposed to be “in love” when you are in love. We are all worked up before marriage; all the energy is gone before we actually need it. You ought to be in love, Screwtape says, when you are wed to the person. The case used to be that our grandparents used to fall in love after they married, it is why they lasted: the love grew after the commitment. In our case, the love has been wasted before the commitment.
I was rereading an essay by Kay Ryan, a wonderful poet of miniaturized poems, poems so small yet so packed with intelligence, they could spark and blow up a room if you struck two of them together, rubbing this head to that head. The essay, “Derichment,” is from Synthesizing Gravity, introduced by Christian Wiman. Then I came across these words: “the secrets remain there, to be visited but not carried away.” And my life showed its face. My love for Anjola is my secret, I want to visit this secret but I don’t want to carry this love away. I want it to be a shrine (remember the line in Davido? “My holy shrine wey me I run to”), I want the love to be a holy shrine, only to be visited, never carried away. There are nights I don’t close my eyes at all until daybreak, just thinking about this person. It is so unusual. Have I developed a fetish? Perhaps. I want to visit the secret but not carry it away. I fear that to carry the secret would be to dispel its power and so to lose it. But how, then, will I marry her? Marriage is a mystery. The secret is not dispelled but kept intact in the precise hand of God. The secret becomes a flower that renews itself, nourished by the breath of God, but that never fades. Intact.
Yet, between the now and marriage, there is a road that must be walked, yes? Is it fear? What if it never happens? If we never marry and never date, then the secret stays pure. Untouched. But if we try and it fails, then the illusion is broken. To try is to pass through death to life and find that the lover is not waiting but that she is already at the tail end of her life, blessed with children and a man who loves God. But it is to know “death.” If the secret knows death, then the secret loses its purity, as A. E. Stallings writes in another poem in which Persephone sends her mother a letter from the underworld: “I miss you and think of you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Thought I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same as mushrooms.
Should I try and fail at the love I have for the woman, the secret, the flower, it becomes a mushroom. It becomes one of the loves I had which failed and which were bound to fail. This is a new page of my life, in Christ, and the hurt of love that lacks real value I do not want to know again. It is almost an existential issue. I don’t want to find that youthful love may be the same everywhere, it is flimsy, fickle, it can waste; it can come to mean nothing. There are two scenes in literature that left me distraught (and they still make my heart ache), and there are two “scenes” in movies. Literature: when, in Love in the Time of Cholera, Fermina Daza returns from the place to which her father “banished” her because of her love relationship with Florentino Ariza and seeing him in the market she hated him, couldn’t believe he was the same person she exchanged love letters with while she was away. She had outgrown him. Another, from a movie, Fury, is the scene where Brad Pitt and the other soldiers enter the house of this woman and her beautiful daughter (or sister), they are Germans, and the beautiful girl plays at the piano and bonds with the young typist who has a distaste for war (Norman Ellison). The soldiers, as is their thing, were going to have their way with the beautiful girl. But a magical moment turns up. The young lady falls in love with Ellison. The scene where they try to communicate by touching casually, Ellison trying to read her palm, saying, “It says here that you will have one great love.” That scene is like music. It is necessary that a soldier sleeps with the girl, so Brad Pitt makes sure that it is Ellison who does it. The girl’s aunt tries to stop it, but Pitt, in German, and in such a stunning performance (other than this, the moment where he discovers that it was his wife was cut apart and put in a box in Seven and he holds a gun about to kill the killer, screaming “No no no no,” is the most moving scene by Pitt that I have seen yet), he says to the woman, “They are young.” Ellison and the girl come out smiling, the girl moving as if caught in some soft fire. Then they step out, the soldiers, and the house the girl is in with her aunt is shelled, and crumbles. Ellison runs to save his love, to no avail. The other movie is Never Let Me Go, a book also; I have never been able to see that movie again, it terrifies me. The last scene is from Junot Diaz’s story, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” from This Is How You Lose Her. In this story, Yunior makes an effort to heal, save, what he has with Magda; to cool down they travel to the Dominican Republic. In the background of this scene, things have got worse, nothing has cooled off, he follows some man to see a place of historical relevance and then he is asked if he wants to step in a pit. He steps in:
This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better. The Vice-President probably saw his future self hanging in this darkness, bulldozing the poor out of their shanties, and Bárbaro, too— buying a concrete house for his mother, showing her how to work the air- conditioner— but, me, all I can manage is a memory of the first time me and Magda talked. Back at Rutgers. We were waiting for an E bus together on George Street and she was wearing purple. All sorts of purple.
And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.
We lose. And we accumulate losses as we grow through life. Does literature make our suffering (resulting from loss) bearable, or does it complicate our suffering? Am I afraid because of these “scenes”? I have suffered the exact hurt in these scenes, more than once. But I don’t want to again. I want to spend my life with this woman, all seven decades or more. I want to be the man that A. E. Stallings is talking about in “Homecoming”:
He loved to watch her at the loom:
The fluent wrists, the liquid motion
Of small tasks not thought about. . .
But I have not forgotten the second stanza of “From Whose Bourn”:
Your claim, that you cannot be replaced,
Holds no water. Others can pick the tomatoes,
Smell the gardens at sunset, stroke the cat,
Watch over your lover deep in a pillow of dreams.
I can be replaced, and Anjola can be replaced.
II
A brief note. My chapbook, A Pocket of Genesis (Variant Lit), is up for preorder. Here’s what Fiyinfoluwa Oladipo, the friend who has taught me much that I know about art, without knowing it himself, here’s what he says about the book—
“In only 29 poems, Ogunyemi is able to first mythologise grief, but then draw the reader into his delicately constructed world of loss. To find, as he describes, the ‘hymn’ in every wound requires careful navigation of what is simultaneously personal, yet shared between us. With an agile ease, Ogunyemi masterfully accomplishes this task to an incredible degree in this chapbook. A Pocket of Genesis carries a challenging yet somber rhythm within it that seizes the reader’s attention in the truest sense. And heralds a talent that brings a different perspective on life, and living, through a kaleidoscopic study in melancholy.”
—Fiyinfoluwa Oladipo, il miglior fabbro.
Please preorder the book here. Thank you.
Yay! Congrats on the chapbook gee!