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GET OUT!
Reviewed by
Howard Slater
The African-American poetry tradition
has a long and propulsive past. However, beyond certain more
well-known writers such as Langston Hughes (currently on the
syllabus) and Amira Baraka and Sonia Sanchez from the 60s onwards
and more recently, NourbeSe Philip and Claudia Rankine, the depth of
this history, reaching back to the likes of Melvin Tolson and
beyond, is not as well known in this country as one would assume (a
similar fate befell Edward Kamau Brathwaite who was resident in this
country in the late 60s.) However, there is an even more neglected
form of writing that could be loosely described as ÔexperimentalÕ,
which this collection by Candace Hill and the books editor, David
Grundy, have here brought back into view. Grundy, author of Black
Arts Poetry Machine, continues his fond excavation of
African-American avant-garde writing by publishing Candace Hill Õs
quite extraordinary long-form poem. This marks only the second
collection of hers to be published since the early 1980s and it
comes across like an upwelling, a long gestating free jazz solo.
A solo it may be but Candace Hill
selects a backdrop, a rhythm section, from which to set out from,
from which to Get Out with: the Umbra group of poets, represented
here by Lloyd Addison and Leroy McLucas as well as Russell Atkins.
In a kind of honouring of the tradition as well as of signifyinÕ
upon it, adding to it in an act of solidarity, as is often the case
with jazz, Hill interweaves poems and extracts from their writing
and figures her own book as almost containing an anthology within
itself. Hers is an ensemble voice (and the ÔIÕ as an ensemble) that
hovers in a time-defying present; a present that draws down onto the
page a magma of verbal collisions, memories, other people places,
soul lyrics, cultural jetsam and racist woundings. It is as if the
method of the writing is one that draws on what Freud called the
Ôprimary process Õ, a process prior to self-censorship, or mores to
the point, freely blowing with language-notes, bent notes, blatted
words, within the confines of the loosest of forms. That said there
are many keystones that ballast this work and show that it is not a
Ôshut-inÕ extemporisation but a considered contribution to the black
avant-garde tradition
As such, we could do well to consult
Henry Louis Gates, Jr, whose book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory
of African American Literary Criticism, raises many points that are
apposite to HillÕs work. Not least of these is GatesÕs tracing of
signifyinÕ in African American culture or as it is often known,
Ôplaying the dozens.Õ This amounts to word games played out on the
street within a conversational context. Gates lists a panoply of
words to make his point: woofing, spouting, jitterbugging, rapping,
beating your gums etc. HillÕs work, I feel, should be taken as
grounded in this context, a context also explored in the poetry of
pianist Cecil Taylor, but which is not readily recognisable in an
Anglo-poetic context. Hill gives voice to this in the introduction
to the book: ÒSometimes I feel just leave it alone but thatÕs so
difficult to do when thereÕs an urge to whack it around a bit more.Ó
This urge puts one in mind of the takes and retakes of jazz, the
repetition and revision of a fixed song, albeit in this case it
seems that Hill is signifyinÕ on her own writing, a writing that
makes free use of the Òdouble voiced word.Ó
This phrase of BakhtinÕs (cited by Gates
as a means of explicating signifyinÕ) is a key to becoming immersed
in HillÕs work, for what is most noticeable is the play on words
that she exhibits, a play with language that is as irreverent and
subversive as Lewis CarrolÕs Jabberwocky (a work she cites in her
book.) There is a marked usage of homophones É
nose: knows
É where the similarity in the sound of
words creates slippages in meaning and yet act as a kind of dub
effect where meanings are doubled, tripled, thickened. Chink by
chink, they undo the signifying chain, our slavishness to iced-over
meaning, and extend out in a vertical vertigo. Up and Out and
On. And so, HillÕs work is closely linked to spoken language, to an
oral culture, to a pronunciation that sets up an always fruitful
dialectical tension between speech and writing as well as giving
rise to made-up words É
understoodments
These are all modes of signifyinÕ and
Gates tracks this back to the coded language of slaves and the
negotiation of white spaces by jazzmen. One could also add that Hill
also exhibits another tactic of occlusion which is witnessed in her
broken-up syntax, perhaps better described by Fred Moten as
Òsyntactic degeneracyÓ, which, again, seems to mirror the way people
speak. So, thereÕs deliberate ÔimperfectionsÕ here too, not just the
syntax, but extended words that summon forth a stuttering speaker,
an unusual cadence, in which sentences achieve a hiatus of missed
emphasis. Or a kind of tourettes in which positive pleonasms and
cuss words suddenly spew forth to mix in a Ôtellingly inarticulateÕ
low culture.
As with free jazz which many find
unlistenable, there is an Ôactive readingÕ that is needed when
embarking upon this book. And as with free jazz once you acclimatise
to its skewed expressionism, its upsetting of form and time-measure,
there is a method and surefooted intent in its Òwhacking aroundÓ;
you get to suspend the obsessive pursuit of meaning, the
narcissistic desire to be mirrored, in an onrush of rambunctious
words that, at many times in this book, reach a kind of bitter sweet
poignancy, a material sensuality that recompenses us for the way the
meaning-making of the senses is often overlooked. The same could be
said of JoyceÕs FinneganÕs Wake, and, as with this work by Candace
Hill, there is somewhat latent here, a tale of crimes that keep
pppppestering forth as a narrative drive of sorts; that is, a
narrative that disaligns itself from the routines of all kinds of
fiction, and opts for a kind of weaving, a dream-work, an unveiling
of defences, a candid reeling.
References
Henry Louis Gates Jr (1988/2014) The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Oxford
University Press.
David Grundy (2018) Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amira
Baraka and the Umbra Poets, Bloomsbury.
Fred Moten (2003) In the Break: The
Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, University of Minnesota
Press.
Jordan Peele (2017) Get Out, Blumhouse
Productions.
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