[note. The
following was originally published in The
Exquisite Corpse in 1993 & again in Thus Spake The
Corpse (An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1999).
Brought into the present context its central argument – as presented
here – has much to say about the nature of language & identity beyond more orthodox
ideas of nativism & foreignness. The
emphasis on American & Jewish writings rhymes as well with matters of
concern to the present editor & touched on from different perspectives in
previous postings on Poems and Poetics.
It is also an acknowledgement of the
role played by major figures in our recent poetry & literature who have
come into English writing as a second or even a third language, but in the
extract cited here goes well beyond that.
A complete version of Nemet-Nejat’s once controversial essay can be
found elsewhere
on the web. (J.R.)]
I speak
no language like a native. Though I have lived in the States since 1959, my
accent still sounds foreign. I was born in Turkey, but I am not Turkish. I am
Jewish. In the fifties most Jews in Turkey were Sephardim and spoke
Ladino Spanish. But I am not a Sephardi;
I am a Persian Jew. My parents had moved to Istanbul on business, and I was born there in
a Jewish neighborhood. But I learnt no Ladino, barely understood it. Jewish
kids in the neighborhood thought I was Moslem, an outsider. At home, my parents
spoke Persian with each other, which also I barely understood. Brothers among
ourselves spoke Turkish. My mother spoke in an immigrant's broken Turkish to me
(my father barely spoke to me at all). Turkish became my mother tongue. I spoke
Turkish in the street. I was, linguistically, most comfortable with other
Turks, who mostly despised Jews. My speech became almost Turkish. Loving a
language not completely my own was my first act as a Jew. And, despite my
almost accentless speech, my first act of rebellion was to tell my Turkish
friends I was not one of them. I was a Jew.
What
Is Then Accented Writing?
What is, then, writing which has an accent?
It is a writing which does not completely identify with the power, authority of
the language it uses; but confronts, without glossing over, the gap between the
user and the language. Such writing reveals an ambiguity towards power: the
writer chooses to embrace a language (because of its pervasive centrality)
which he/she knows is not quite his/her own, is insufficient for his/her inner
purposes. Accent in writing has little to do with explicit theme or semantic
context; it rather has to do with texture, structure, the scratches,
distortions, painful gaps (in rhythms, syntax, diction, etc.) caused by the
alien relationship between the writer and his/her adopted language. Accent is
cracks (many unconscious, the way a speaker is unaware of his or her accent
when speaking, does not have to create it ) on the transparent surface.
Accented Jewish writing embodies, rather
than erases, this ambiguity towards power. By doing that it creates its accent.
Kafka, to me, is the first modern, European writer who reveals the Jew's ambiguity
towards power in terms of an accent in the texture of his language. His
language of choice as a writer is not Yiddish or Czech but legal German (that
of an intricate legal brief), a double embrace of power: first of the cultural
mainstream, second, that section of it which codifies its power. But Kafka's
accent subverts that legal code, divests it of its meaning, turns the language
of the powerful into a language of the victim, of alienation. To me, Kafka's
subject is a stylistic dialogue about the ambiguity of power, between the
powerful and the victim, a sadomasochistic elaboration of the Book of Job, the chosen man of God also
chosen as a victim. Interestingly, Kafka's fiction (as opposed to his diaries)
has very few direct references to Jews, almost no semantic, but only stylistic,
Jewish content.
The
Essence of American Sound, Can It Be the Music of Diaspora?
Why did Kafka write Amerika, why was he attracted to the subject of the United States?
German also accents Am-erika. What did he hear in the word Oklahoma? A wild, alien, distant sound in
German, Oklahoma! At the same time, an intimate sound, one of
the rare words in English with vowel harmony, which is also, I imagine, in Czech. Kafka
hears in Oklahoma
the alien ground in which his private soul can nest itself, the synthesis
between the powerful and the victim. That is why he associates his open-ended,
endless nirvana of liberation in the Theater (Noah's Ark)
of Oklahoma.
What is the word Oklahoma
after all, but the imprint of the Native American, the victim, the invaded in
the language of the master. American English: the language which embodies
that peculiar combination, victim and
victor possessing the same language, yoked together by fate.
Using American English as a poet is the
outsider, the victim, embracing, emulating the language of the master, being
constantly beset by the ambiguities of power.
American
Poetry, The Poetics of Accents
What makes this poetry different from
others, from French, from English? Here lies its radical ambiguity: American
English, as a poetic language, is not a mother tongue in the usual sense but a
pseudo-mother, step-mother tongue. It can have no tradition, its vocabulary no
public or mythical, only personal, private resonances. It is the language of
pervasive power, without resonance, of authority in which the immigrant, the
victim must speak. Writing poetry in American English is a continuous act of
translating from a radical inside or from a radical beyond. Its well of
inspiration is always outside, never in the mining or contributing to the
flowerings of a tradition. The reading and the writing of American poetry must
always be discontinuous. Accepting a central, authoritative tradition undercuts
its balance of power and victimhood.
Even to the powerful, American English is
unstable, its power ambiguous. When the Puritan, for example, spoke English,
the Puritan saw himself/herself threatened by the geographic and moral
wilderness around, which even destabilized the inner certitudes. His/her
language is defensive, doubting its ability to embrace, cope with the darkness
beyond the ring of light, the ring of reason.
That alienation, instability between writer
and language, a radical skepticism about its ability to reveal inner truth constitute
its essential nature. The relation of the poet to the language is inescapably
confrontational. American English is the quintessential unnatural,
insufficient, weak language which the writer has to bend, distort, to translate
into, to interject his or her vision. To me, three nineteenth century writers,
none of them Jewish but white protestant, embody this accented writing:
Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson. Hawthorne's
Puritan English prose is tortured, twisted to assimilate both the wilderness
beyond on the continent and the wilderness within. (Read the first pages of House Of The Seven Gables; it is Henry
James at his purest. All of Henry James and more is in it.) Melville's
compulsive, encyclopedic lists of whaling lore crack up, can not contain the
nihilism at the core and must spill into splintered moments of black vision
which masquerade as narrative. Dickinson
invents a language which only pretends to be English and must be read over and
over again to be stripped into its message, a violent sadomasochism. Words are
private emblems, the syntax unstable, constantly shifting, not quite an
"English" syntax, the smooth "hymnal" surface hiding,
shafted with a sadomasochistic violence.
All these works are written by writers, though white Christians, for whom the given language is not really
their own, not really their "natural," mother tongue.
Contemporary Jewish writing, embodying the
ambiguous relationship to power, is therefore a specific example of American
writing. Emily Dickinson, the Protestant spinster completely at home at Amherst
but completely out of it, is to me the American poet, the Jew, the
sister/neighbor in exile, whose enigmatic, excessive, possessive, distant,
recalcitrant company I can take only a few poems at a time.
To
Be a Poet Or Reader of Uncanonizable Poetics
American poetics is asocial, therefore,
uncanonizable. I am not talking about changing the canon, therefore creating a
new structure of power; discontinuous means uncanonizable. I must apply the
principle of quantum mechanics here. The moment a style or a poet is canonized,
therefore gaining a privileged mainstream position, the language written in
that style loses the tension between power and victimhood and stops being
American. Writing poetry in American English is not a trade or guild activity
to be taught at special schools or communities (while making movies or TV shows
is), but an act of personal survival.
Reading American poets is essentially
following a series of distinct, discontinuous personal strategies in language.
Tradition in the European sense is an illusion in American poetry. Even the
"newest" French or English writer writes with a hope of one day
becoming a "classic." Thinking of the future, or even in the
traditional sense of the past, thinking of a continuity, are ruinous for an
American poet or critic. Therefore, Jabès and Derrida, masters of academic
style, tools to create a new canon, have no relevance to an American poet
unless as abject objects to be attacked.
Harold Bloom's paradigm of anxiety of
influence, the poet struggling with his linguistic father-predecessor, is
wrong. With the possible exception of Allen Ginsberg and Whitman, I know no
American poet who has created truly original work as a "flowering" of
a previous poet. In a radical sense, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Stein,
Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Creeley, Ashbery have no American beginnings or ends. The
contemporary attempt to create a new canon
around, for example, the figures of Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards,
Dickinson and Stein is to misunderstand their work. The accents (in Susan
Howe's word, "hesitations,") in Dickinson's,
or any other poet's writing, are unreproduceable, completely idiosyncratic. To
think that Stein's repetitions or Ashbery's mellifluously expansive meditations
are linguistic tools bequeathed to later poets in terms of a "flowering
poetic tradition" is wrong-headed. In American poets these are outside
trappings of idiosyncratic, personal solutions, accents, that can be completely
ignored by and are only marginally useful to another poet. What unifies the
poets is their unchanging, confrontational, aggressive relationship to their
language. None of them is writing in his or her mother tongue and must
therefore distort, accent it to make it his/her own.
Accented
Relationships Among Poets: Is There No Influence Then?
Creeley calls Zukofsky "the teacher of
all of us," but Creeley does not imitate or expand on Zukofsky's poetic
style. He undercuts it by creating hesitations, weaknesses (accents) in its
architecture. Creeley mishears Zukofsky's reading of his own poems by
"hearing" stops at his line breaks. To do that to a Zukofsky poem (to
a lyric like "Songs Of Degrees"), in essence, is to demolish (to add
excessive stops to) its sound architecture. But vocal hesitations at line ends
(independent of syntax) is the core of Creeley's poetic sound, the power of its
vulnerable intimacy. In essence, Creeley's relation to Zukofsky is
confrontational, accented. What he learns from Zukofsky is, I think, to turn
the language he is born to, English, into an alien, slightly abstract structure
of sound he can crack, poke into. What he learns from Zukofsky, is American English.
Zukofsky, a foreigner, teaches Creeley, the
Puritan, English as a foreign language, a structure of power Creeley does not
completely own. At his most original Creeley subverts Zukofsky's powerful
architecture of sound to interject his weaknesses, hesitations. For Creeley
Zukofsky is the alien, the outside which softens the smug nastiness, the male
chauvinism of the early poems in For Love.
It brings them ambiguity, restraint, by turning their power driven misogyny
inward, into a language of vulnerability and pathos.
The
Music of the Victim Is the Language of the Unnamed
In American poetry the father (tradition)
and the mother tongue (the language of intimate and evocative words) are split.
This confrontation makes the American poem an attack into the unsayable
(socially and spiritually). To evoke what is unnamed is, always, to evoke what
is not in the physical body of the language, in its material music. The
language of weakness, of the unnamed, must have a Puritanical bias, "Thou
shalt not worship graven words." The poet's instinctive love for words,
their physicality, is suspect, must be restrained.
The music of words (of their plasticity) is
tradition. The music between words is the language of the outside, the unnamable.
That's why Zukofsky, whom Creeley calls the poet with the perfect ear, can be,
maybe must be, tone deaf. That's why Dickinson, the supreme American poet, has
so few quotable, physically luscious lines. American poem is anti-musical, can
not preen its physical achievement like a peacock. Once again, Whitman sticks
out against my theories like a sore thumb.
The
American poem (and poet) is always trapped in the space between words, in the
crack between his/her vision and the language he/she is using, in the
discontinuity (as opposed to cultural unity) between the self and his/her
language. His/her soul belongs to somewhere else. That is why if he/she is
influenced by another poet, that poet is almost always from another language,
French, Indian, Turkish, German, Spanish, Japanese, etc. Or, more often, the
mother lode of influence is another medium, cubism or abstractionism in
painting, Jazz, photography, movies, TV, etc. American poems are continuous
acts of translations from another language or medium or both. In this process,
the languages of origin (Chinese, French, Vietnamese, Turkish, Romanian,
Russian, Spanish, etc.) or aesthetic philosophies are not hierarchical,
canonical, but coexist on the same level. No language is superior over another
language. Surrealism is no more relevant than Sufism, deconstructionism or
anthropology than Zen, glyphs than photographs, the poets Yunus Emre, Zbigniew
Herbert, Xavier Villaurrutia than Arthur Rimbaud.
As I said, American English is neutral with
no personal, cultural associations. No more is this more clear than in Emily
Dickinson. What do sun, father, Hunter, He, God, etc. (all images of authority)
mean in her work? Nothing. They are essentially blank emblems, a chain of Moby
Dicks, completely stripped of their traditional associations, around which the
poet weaves her barely decipherable soul. Under the deceptive music of a hymn,
of a little embroidering lady, the blankness of these crucial images
liberates/unhinges the syntax in the poems, completely privatizes it. What is Moby Dick after all? An attack on
whiteness, an asocial, self-destructive pursuit of the unnamable, which all the
lists, all the encyclopedias, all the charts, all the lore of the country can
not name. Call me Ishmael, the poet, who (I) must a tale unfold/ Whose lightest
word... I am thy father. ... Seems, madam? No it's. I have that
within me which passeth show. ... Others trappings and suits of woe …”
The unnamable, ineffable, the radically
inner implicate, require, fate, a confrontation with the father tongue. The
music is in the ensuing unhinging.
