CHOP/THE WORLD/THE KWANSABA
Redmond, Treasure Shields. chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou
hamer. Stow, Ohio: Winged City Chapbooks, 2015.
"Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other
experience," Herbert Marcuse wrote in the conclusion of The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique
of Marxist Aesthetics (1978), "a dimension in which human beings,
nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality
principle" (72). Like other
thinkers of his tribe, Marcuse reified the limits of the binary as he struggled
to break free from its grip. His dilemma
is nicely refracted in the closing proposition of his lucid essay: "If the
remembrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle for
changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto
suppressed in the previous historical revolutions" (73). Echoing a bourgeois title to locate the
conditional, he illuminates the suppressive force of language that imprisons
one in "the established reality principle." Is there no way out? Yes, there is, but Marcuse stopped short of
taking it. Reality principles are not
established or fixed; they are remarkably fluid. Over a long period of time, a revolution first
changes prevailing modes of thinking, which, during another span of time, changes the material conditions of human life. Thus, Fannie Lou Hamer was a bit more
perspicacious than Marcuse in understanding revolution. She lived what he could only theorize.
As an engaged poet who wishes to open a hitherto rarely
accessed dimension, Treasure Redmond is to be commended for crafting a
collection of kwansabas as a tribute to one of the bravest women who ever lived
in the Mississippi Delta. chop is book that W. E. B. DuBois might
have mentioned favorably in The Gift of
Black Folk (1924). Redmond took the
challenge of contemporary poetics to be innovative in using a fixed form, the
kwansaba; she also accepted the challenge of representing how the forms of
things unknown functioned in Hamer's mind and in Hamer's letting a light shine on the American body
politic of the twentieth century. In her
introductory remarks for the collection, Redmond asserts that her intention was
to let "the poems seek to work in concert using the economical nature of
the Kwansaba form to get at what was most essential about Hamer's mammoth
contribution to American life"(2). chop is a remarkable fulfillment of that
intention.
The collection is a practical touchstone for testing
Marcuse's theory regarding aesthetic dimensions. The kwansaba, for the benefit
of those who are unfamiliar with the form, was invented by Eugene B. Redmond in
1995, and it is a form that demands discipline, craft and craftiness. A kwansaba must have seven lines; each line
must contain seven words; each word must have seven or fewer letters. Many poets choose to write lines in their
kwansabas that flow with minimal internal punctuation, enabling readers to
experience uninterrupted sweeps of sound.
Treasure Redmond, however, maximizes the implicit economy of the
kwansaba, using short units of sound to imitate the syntactic/synchronic
character of thought and the additive qualities of speech. Consider five lines from "justice"
(page 14):
we stay in holly springs. can't stay
in oxford. awaiting
trial like daniel. den
so loud we hear it 25 miles
away. sheriff, police, highway patrol namd law
breakr. they got cousins in the jury
Line 2 is the jewel .
The occurrence of a period between "daniel" and
"den" is a rewarding disruption of our clichéd expectation ---daniel
(in the lion's ) den; we are also sound-slammed into recognition of the
hitherto unavailable by "den/so loud," momentarily hearing the "din" in the "den," a most accurate rendering of Mississippi
Delta dialect. One suspects that Redmond
learned how to use dialect judiciously from the master poets Paul Laurence
Dunbar and Sterling A. Brown and from
listening attentively to how talk sounds and means in some parts of
Mississippi.
It unlikely that chop
or any collection of modern poetry can or should escape the reality principles
signified by language, because the dimensions the kwansabas open for us are not
ahistorical. Indeed, for readers who
know little about Civil Rights history in Mississippi, a full appreciation of
those dimensions might require surfing the Internet, or, reading For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou
Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1999) by Chana Kai Lee and other books about the unfinished struggles
for civil and human rights in the American South. The specific referents in the poems -----"winona
/jail," "fannie, annie and vickie," "marlowe,"
"paps," and " 'lantic city," for example--and Redmond's
chronological sampling from Hamer's life history test one's cultural literacy.
Readers will construct the aesthetic dimensions of chop in accordance with the knowledge or
lack of knowledge they can use in negotiations with the kwansabas. Much to her credit, Treasure Redmond
demonstrates how the discipline of the kwansaba can move readers to have transformative
aesthetic experiences in acquiring a more critical sense of America's history.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
September 15, 2015
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