After his ex-lover was released from prison and converted to Catholicism, the infamous poet Arthur Rimbaud swore off writing and instead sought more reliable employment. After a brief stint in the Dutch army in Indonesia, he eventually found work with the Bardey Agency, a French colonial merchant firm, first working in their office in Aden and eventually becoming head of their office in Harar, Ethiopia. Notorious in his youth as a vagrant, drunk, provocateur, possible sodomite, at least vaguely socialist, Rimbaud spent his later years exporting coffee and importing European weapons for Menelilk II.
It is conventional to read this transition, as Rimbaud seems to have, as a sharp rupture. The poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé once said that Rimbaud “surgically remove[d] poetry from himself while still alive.” Momtaza Mehri, however, in her new book Bad Diaspora Poems, attempts to trace through him some analogous lines of flight between literary inspiration and colonial accumulation;
dried inkwell
gun fingers up
rebrand accordingly
trader
dog-killer
mercenary
spice-flogger
slave-trader
teetol has-been
lounging expat
erratic teenage dream
reckless lice seekersummertime & the living is easy
your daddy’s absent and your mama’s sick
your old man boils seawater
somewhere in Algiers
he plants a tricolour
self-annihilation is a moving goalpost
find it in Africa
invariably Africa
motherless mother
melt
into the mutilation of its leaky cosmosquestions will be asked
you don’t have to answer
settlers drink from reservoirs of goodwill
spit forth their catalogued observations
drowning
as they inspect(‘Harar in Rimbaud’, p. 8)
Of course, we’re not really talking about Rimbaud.
As the title suggests, Mehri is cynical almost to the point of ruthlessness about the games that are played in contemporary Poetryland. Publishers and readers alike demand confessions, ‘trauma’, and when combined with the spectaclising effects of public racialisation, the result is a pressure on Black, migrant writers to produce exotic colonial tableaus, to therapise, to turn native informant. “Like attending your own funeral as a spectator”, as Mehri puts it in one poem (‘A Native Informant Describes a Reading to Her Friends in the Ends’, p. 83).
… Soon as they know you, he says,
they will destroy you. Diaspora poems want to be known. We want to be gutted
by pious mic drops & vapid priorities. Yes, our allegiances are sullied.We are victims, which means we are innocent. Immaculate & self-possessed.
We are victims, so our poems must be good…(‘Bad Diaspora Poem’, p. 106)
The problem is, of course, that writers do often wish to write about their experiences. How do you write about something without exposing it to enemy fire? Without becoming supplier to someone else’s fantasy? How do you avoid cynically mining your life history, your family, a mythicised heritage, for new pulp for the paper mill?
As Mehri suggests, you can’t. The search for poetic inspiration can’t escape the conditions it appears in; like family, diaspora, and the ‘motherlands’ that suture the two, the result is always mutilated and mutilating, distortive, leaky, evasive of authorial control. All you can do is keep writing, and occasionally gesture to something outside the game; Mehri’s verse is suffused with references to Fanon, Biko, to histories of struggle, that she usually spares the vulnerable exposure of detailed written account. (It is, after all, more pleasant to participate in revolutions than to write about them.)
That said, for me, the strengths of this book might also characterise its weaknesses. If perhaps its appeal is the recognition of some of the key problems of contemporary Poetryland and a willingness to keep writing anyway, it is also not attempting to outmanouevre the contemporary taste for what i have previously (somewhat dismissively) labelled ‘observations strung up on metaphors’. i sometimes wondered if some of the poems in here wouldn’t be better of as essays. i get it, i do, but it’s not my thing. i don’t read poetry to find someone saying something i think is true, i read it to see someone having fun with language, whether simple play or straining words to their limits.
That said, i do happen to think a lot of Bad Diaspora Poems’ observations are true. And nearly every time i was unure of what i’ll call the obervation probelm, Mehri has enough wit and rhythm to catch me out, shocked and outmanouevred by a scepticism that exceeds my own but not yet unable to laugh at itself, moving to its own cadence.
—
Thank you for reading.
For another taste of Mehri’s poetry, i would recommend checking out ‘A Violet Coagulation of Dispersals’ in The White Review, republished in this volume. [link]
For some of her nonfiction writing, i would recommend ‘On Identity Politics and the Right Kind of Mistakes’, which i return to regularly. My use of the word ‘game’ in this review is informed by this essay. [link]
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